Summer 2018 is a busy time for the TC-11 community. This week alone, the 2nd Document Analysis and Recognition Summer School is being held in La Rochelle, France, and bids to host ICFHR 2022 are due. In mid-July, bids for DAS 2022 are due, and there are multiple paper deadlines - please consult the Dates and Deadlines section along with the corresponding posts in this issue.

Early in August the 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) is being held in Niagara Falls, USA. Registration ends July 31st. We have an excellent program lined up, including keynote speakers Kevin Knight and Gregory R. Crane. Sponsors include MyScript, Wiris, Hyperscience, and ISI at the University of Southern California. Toward the end of August, the IAPR’s flagship meeting ICPR will be held in Beijing, which will include sessions and workshops related to document recognition and analysis.

On the employment front, there are opportunities for PostDocs and Researchers at the University of Rouen, France, and Uppsala University, Sweeden. For students looking for internships, please consult the IAPR Internship Brokerage List (http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/IAPR/INDUSTRIAL).

We hope that the Summer School is a great success, and look forward to seeing a number of you in Niagara Falls and Beijing in August. Take care until then.

Call for Proposals to Host ICFHR 2022 (repost)

Important Dates

July 1, 2018 Proposal submission deadline

Overview. Continuing a long tradition, the international research community plans to gather in Niagara Falls, USA, for the 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition on August 5-8, 2016 (http://icfhr2018.org). In keeping with the practice of the community, proposals are now being solicited for hosting ICFHR 2022, the 18th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.

ICFHR is the premier event for identifying, encouraging, and exchanging ideas in handwriting recognition research, as well as for promoting novel applications at the frontiers of this important field. The single-track conference brings together leading researchers and practitioners in on-line and off-line handwriting recognition.

The series of the ICFHR conferences is a continuation of the ten IWFHRs (Montreal 1990, Chateau de Bonas 1991, Buffalo 1993, Taipei 1994, Colchester 1996, Taejon 1998, Amsterdam 2000, Niagara on the Lake 2002, Tokyo 2004, La Baule 2006). Previous ICFHR conferences were held in Montreal 2008, Kolkata 2010, Bari 2012, Crete 2014, and Shenzhen 2016. The 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, ICFHR 2020, is scheduled to be held in Dortmund, Germany, on September 8-10, 2020.

Proposals. Individuals and groups who are interested in handwriting recognition research are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting ICFHR 2022. According to the normal rotation, the year 2022 would see the conference located somewhere in Asia, but proposals from other locales are encouraged as well.

Teams interested in making a proposal should express their interest to do so as soon as possible. Finalized proposals should be sent to: Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Chair, dimos@cvc.uab.es, and Masakazu Iwamura, TC-11 Vice Chair, masa@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp.

In addition, proposers should be prepared to make a brief presentation to the community during a special session at ICFHR 2018 after which a vote will be taken to determine the winning bid (ICFHR 2018 Program) on the last day of the conference.

Call for Proposals to Host DAS 2020 (repost)

Important Dates

July 15, 2018 Proposal submission deadline

Overview. Following the successful organisation of the 13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems in Vienna (Austria) by General Chairs Robert Sablatnig and Florian Kleber, we are now soliciting proposals for organising and hosting DAS 2020.

Proposals. Individuals and groups interested in Document Analysis Systems are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting DAS 2020. The event will preferably take place in late summer/fall, but is not limited to this period. Extra care should be taken that other events of the community taking place during the same year (e.g. ICPR and ICFHR).

The submission deadline is July 15th, 2018. Proposals should be submitted to the TC11 chair (Dimosthenis Karatzas) and vice-chair (Masakazu Iwamura).

If you already know whether you are interested in preparing a proposal, please send us an email expressing your interest. Note that an expression of interest is not a commitment to make a formal proposal nor an official bid. If you need further information concerning DAS, please feel free to contact us.

Selection. The final selection among competing proposals will be made short after the deadline by the DAS Steering Committee, which is composed of all those who have themselves organized or contributed substantially to past DAS workshops.

Overview. With the advent of high-end technology, fraudulent efforts are on rise in many areas of our daily life, may it be fake paper documents, forgery in the digital domain or copyright infringement. In solving the related criminal cases use of pattern recognition (PR) principles is also gaining an important place because of their ability in successfully assisting the forensic experts to solve many of such cases.

The 7th IAPR International Workshop on Computational Forensics (IWCF) will aim at addressing the theoretical and practical issues related to this field, i.e. role of PR techniques for analyzing problems in forensics. Effort is to bring the people together who are working on these issues in different areas including document and speech processing, music analysis, digital security, forensic sciences, etc.

Areas of Interest. Some broad areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

Detection of fake documents

Authentication of security documents

Change detection

Copyright protection

Encryption and watermarking

Digital forensics

Encryption and watermarking

Handwriting and Speech analysis

Face, Palm, and Iris recognition

Anti-forensics and anti-anti-forensics Techniques

Data leakage, Data protection and Database forensics

Investigation of Virtual and Cloud Environments

Malware forensics

SDN forensics

Mobile device forensics

Change detection

Cyber threat intelligence

Large-Scale cyber investigations

Network forensics and network traffic analysis

Like in previous years, the workshop will be a place for elaborate discussion of academic and industrial works, documenting the advances in the related field and creating mutual collaboration on related areas. Interaction among practitioners and academic researchers will receive special attention in this workshop.

Paper Submission. Springer will proceed with the publication of the ICPR workshops proceedings in the LNCS series after the workshop. There will be an informal proceeding during the workshop for communications and finally the proceeding will be published.

Full Papers
Full papers should describe complete works of original research. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not being considered in another forum.The submission format should follow the LNCS Springer layout (see instructions here) with length from 12 to 14 pages .

Short Papers
Authors may submit short papers providing an opportunity to report on research in progress, to present novel positions or a demonstration proposal. The submission format should follow the LNCS Springer layout (see instructions here) with length from 6 to 8 pages.

It is our pleasure to announce the 1st International Workshop on Music Reading Systems (WoRMS). It will take place on Thursday, the 20th of September 2018, at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (292 Rue Saint-Martin, 75003 Paris), as a satellite event to ISMIR 2018.

WoRMS is a new workshop that tries to connect researchers who develop music reading systems — especially from the field of optical music recognition, but also related topics such as score following or cross-modal retrieval — with researchers and practitioners that could benefit from such systems, like librarians or musicologists.

WoRMS will be organized as a one-day workshop and we hope it will provide a novel opportunity to share ideas, discuss current developments and shape the future of music reading systems. We would like for diverse points of view to engage, by explicitly inviting contributors without a technical background to participate as well.

We strive to make the workshop as interactive as possible, with participants getting the opportunity not just to present their work, but to discuss current research in depth and foster relationships within the community. Therefore, promising ideas, work-in-progress submissions and recently submitted or published works are equally welcome. In order to promote discussion, we will use OpenReview (the full Call for Submissions is available at https://sites.google.com/view/worms2018/call-for-papers).

IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)

IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly 50%. For additional details, see the links below:

PostDoc and Researcher Positions at Uppsala University

The group at the Centre for Image Analysis active in the field on Handwritten Text Recognition at Uppsala Univeristy is recruiting two new team members (PostDoc or Researcher positions). We encourage strong candidates to apply and join us at Uppsala. The appointments are for a maximum of two years - details may be found through the links above.

Univ. Rouen (France): Research Engineer / PostDoc Position (repost)

LITIS (Laboratoire d’Informatique, Traitement de l’information et des Systèmes) is a research laboratory associated to the University of Rouen Normandie, Le Havre Normandie Normandie, and School of Engineering INSA Rouen Normandie. Research at LITIS is organized around 7 research teams which contribute to 3 main application domains: Access to Information, Biomedical Information Processing, Ambient Intelligence. LITIS currently includes 90 faculty staff members, 50 PhD students, 10 PostDoc and Research Engineers. The Machine Learning team of LITIS is developing research in modeling unstructured data (signals, images, text, etc…) with machine learning algorithms and statistical models. For more than two decades it has contributed to the development of reading systems and document image analysis for various applications such as postal automation, business document exchange, digital libraries, etc…

The EURHISFIRM project aims at developing a research infrastructure to connect, collect, collate, align, and share reliable long-run company-level data for Europe to enable researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to analyze, develop, and evaluate effective strategies to promote investment and economic growth. To achieve this goal, EURHISFIRM develops innovative tools to spark a “Big data” revolution in the historical social sciences and to open access to cultural heritage.

EURHISFIRM is funded by the European Commission within the Infrastructure Development Program of Horizon 2020. The goal of the Program is to develop world-class research infrastructures lasting for decades (https://ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/index_en.cfm?pg=home ). Research infrastructures are facilities, resources and services used by the science community to foster innovation and extend the frontiers of knowledge.

The first phase of the Infrastructure Development Program lasts for three years. It aims at developing an in-depth design study of the Research Infrastructure. After this phase, Development and Consolidation Phases follow if further applications will be successful. EURHISFIRM brings together eleven research institutions in economics, history, information technologies and data science from seven European countries.

Missions
Within the project, you will be in charge of developing text information recognition technologies (ICR) from historical document images (mostly printed), and information extraction from these data (such as person names, names of companies, dates, positions, stock prices etc…). The datasets are made of financial yearbooks and price lists of European companies, in different European languages. Your mission includes:

The development of a machine learning based reading system of text lines composed of both deep optical models, and language models (statistical, and grammar based). Layout analysis falls out of the scope of the mission.

Data preparation for evaluation purposes

Benchmarking with other technologies (commercial products)

Integration of the system as a web service allowing its integration and deployment into a full system

Coordination with partners of the project regarding datasets preparation and collation of datasets, as well as software interoperability with other developments within the EurHisFirm consortium.

Requirements
The successful applicant should have a strong record in statistical machine learning and have experience in one popular platform and programming language in the field, so as to design, develop and make the prototype evolve.

PhD, or Computer Engineer, with a good record in Machine Learning

Demonstrates ability to work in a team, curious and rigorous spirit

Excellent written and verbal communication skills (French and English)

Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR - repost)

The web page lists internship opportunities for students at different levels of education and specialism. We expect many additional internship opportunities to be listed here as the community becomes more aware of the site.

Call for Contributions: To contribute news items, please send a short
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